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Key points
- Downsizing isn't about letting go and giving up. It's a chance to lighten your load and focus on what you love.
- Instead of hanging on to things that don't matter, enjoy what you love: Wear the pearls, use your best china, and love every minute of it.
- Once you downsize, step out into your new, less burdened life with a clear sense of who you have become.
When my mother-in-law realized it was time to downsize, for both her ease and her wellbeing, she hired someone to help her. I don’t remember her name. Let’s just call her Angel.
She came to my mother-in-law’s well-appointed spacious home and spent a day talking with her about what she had done, where she had lived, and what she loved the most about her life. While they talked, Angel walked through the house with my mother-in-law, asking her about the artwork, the furniture: where each of the objects came from, and what they meant to her.
Objects matter. They are powerful. They carry memories. They harbor dreams. They are the treasured things we own that make a house our home. Angel understood this and wanted my mother-in-law to leave her well-loved home with her memories intact.
The next day, she brought a drawing of my mother-in-law’s new home showing where her most loved possessions would reside. Just as carefully as Angel had listened to my mother-in-law’s stories, she had translated those stories into a new setting and given them a new, uncluttered life.
When moving day came, Angel and her crew arrived early in the morning, packed all of my mother-in-law's most loved memories and dreams, and whisked them away to the new place, leaving everything else behind to be sold, shipped to family members, or given to charity.
By four o’clock that afternoon, all those memories and dreams were in place at the new apartment, and what had once been a tentative and scary step into leaving a home and starting a downsized life, had morphed into a new life in a new home filled with precious memories and dreams for my mother-in-law.
It was by all accounts, the easiest move ever.
As Angel so clearly demonstrated, there are things in our lives and our homes that take up space, and there are cherished objects filled with powerful memories that give us breath and pleasure. In short: there’s a whole lot of stuff we should, and can, leave behind.
If you do it like Angel did, downsizing can become a pleasure.
So, how do you let go enough to discover what matters?
I think the hardest things to let go of are those gifts you have gotten over the years that bear the memory of the giver more than they capture your memories.
Unless you want to haul all your clutter with you, you should use downsizing as a chance to shed things that don’t matter, rediscover those that do matter, and free the things you have been keeping for “special occasions” into loved objects you will enjoy every day for the rest of your life.
That’s what downsizing is really about: the rest of your life.
Make it a good one.
Instead of either storing or getting rid of the good china, your best clothing, that gorgeous string of pearls that once belonged to your grandmother, the silver candlesticks, and your best linens, plan to use them.
In fact, get rid of those things that, as Maria Kondo says, don’t delight. Let downsizing be your excuse to make every day special.
Use the fancy linen. Pull out the fine china. Put on the pearls. Light the beautiful candles. Live like today and every next day you have going forward is a gift. Because it is.
Prefer the everyday to the fancy and fussy? Then give the fancy away to someone who will use it, and glory in the comfortable flannel shirt of the everyday you've always cherished.
It’s your choice, but however you choose to live in your downsized life, the key is choosing. Don’t drag everything with you into this next phase of your life. Make the decisions you’ve always wanted to but were afraid to make.
Step out into your new, less burdened life with a sense of who you have become and which dreams you want to bring along for the ride.
